The period (full stop) is the punctuation mark that marks the grammatical and logical end of a sentence.

The main difference comes from its greatest use in English. In Spanish, the period generally signals a pause or separation; the relationship is generally expressed with the comma and the semicolon.

English uses the period before conjunctions, adverbs, or phrases, whereas Spanish opts for a pause that is less marked.

The period is used in English to signal decimals and the comma (NOT the apostrophe) to set off thousands, millions, etc. In Spanish, the practice is the opposite.

I’d like to briefly return to discuss the issue of the significant development that took place last month, culminating in the outing of the lauded author under the pseudonym of “NightJack.”

First off, I find it important to emphasize just how fascinating an event this is: to the opinion of many, this is the first time in modern journalism history that an established paper has gone to pains to unmask a confidential source, flying in the face of the respected and traditional practice of fighting as hard as possible to preserve the anonymity of sources–especially those that report from the front lines of civil life, as was the case with NightJack, the audacious cop with a taste for laying bare that which others were intent on covering up.

What could have motivated The Times of London to dispense with this provocative though surely enlightening blogger (that is effectively what they did, as since they outed the man behind the blog NightJack has been no more)?  It would seem that the benefits of unmasking an officer with a penchant for embarrassing his superiors (is that really a sin?) have been more than outweighed by the resulting exodus of potentially insightful sources from the blogosphere, now and in the future.

In Britain as in most of the world, it would appear that popular sentiment is coming down on the side of the winner of the Orwell Prize for Blogging, not at all due to sympathies towards his person but rather because most people value morality over legality; and, as is widely circulating at the moment, the Times’ actions were doubtlessly legal in nature, but equally indubitably reprehensible from a moral perspective.

What will come next in the surprisingly thrilling world of blogs?  Stay tuned…

Neatorama.com has posted an excerpt from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader highlighting different words and expressions whose meanings are not the same now as they were in the past.

The list is fun, informative, and most of all, accurate. The classic example of “irony” is brought up and, well, it won’t do anything to solve the matter. Its misuse was brought to light by Alanis Morrisette’s infamous and painful (for many reasons) song titled “Ironic”, whose only ironic aspect, of course, was that none of its situations were ironic, but the corruption of the meaning of the word had begun well before that.

Aside from that, however, the examples of “decimate”, “card sharp”, and “spit and image” represent nothing more than an evolution of meaning and an accommodation (psychologically speaking) that allows for speakers to preserve the word or phrase by having it make sense (spitting image versus spit and image is the best example of that, in my opinion) instead of being a random and isolated collection of phonemes that are supposed to mean something. We are fighting cognitive dissonance here, people.

Improper use of “beg the question”, however, is just a sign of ignorance. IT MEANS TO AVOID A QUESTION, NOT TO PROMPT ONE. I will not change my stance on that.

Albanian is a macrolanguage spoken by roughly 15 million inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, mainly in Albania, located in Europe’s southeastern corner.

The oldest book to have been written in Albanian is the Meshari, written by the Catholic clergyman Gjon Buzuku in 1555.

It was initially suggested that Albanian was the only surviving member of the Iliric languages that were traditionally spoken in the southeast of the Balkans.  Nonetheless, there is currently stronger evidence that it is related to the ancient Dacian language spoken in Moesia and Dacia.  The principal evidence lies in the form of pre-Roman loans in modern Rumanian, presumably having come from Dacian, that are clearly similar to modern Albanian.

Then again, it’s not clear whether the Dacian and Iliric languages belonged to different branches of the Indo-European language family, though most academics tend to think that they were.

The translation process is defined as the operation of obtaining the closest natural equivalent primarily in terms of meaning as well as the style (attempt to convey the same meaning and the same style as the original).

Nida denotes two types of equivalency: formal equivalency, in which the formal characteristics of the source text are reproduced mechanically in the translated text, with the resulting distortion of grammatical and stylistic patterns that complicate comprehension in the reader (based around the transformation of the meaning); and dynamic equivalence, where the message is conserved and the answer for the reader of the translation is essentially the same as that of the reader of the original work (we look to acheive the same effect in the reader of the translation as in the reader of the original text).

Steiner proposes a hermeneutic process (using cultural baggage) that consists of four stages: initial trust (in the original text and as a translator), the impulse of generosity on the part of the translator based on the supposition that there is something worthy of understanding (there is a text that is worth the effort for another culture to learn about it): aggression (with the changes), handling the comprehension that implies invasion and extraction; incorporation, importing a meaning (message) and form (attempting to maintain it), which is an act that often modifies the original; and the necessary final stage of restoring balance (revision).

The act of translating a text can sometimes have effects that run much deeper than the agent in charge of performing the translation may be aware.  All it takes is a cursory look at history to appreciate this fact.

For example, the translation of the Bible into Latin was a major contributing factor to the consolidation of Christianity throughout Europe during the dusk of the Roman Empire and following its fall.  Likewise, the translation of the Bible into various vernacular languages centuries later (such as Martin Luther’s translation into German) were precipitous of the split in the Church, a historical event known as the Protestant Reformation.

All in all, translation is by and large an inglorious, unsung affair; but every once in a while there is a translation of such importance, of such weight that the world perceives it as a before-and-after marker.

The Slavic languages belong to the Indo-European family of languages.  They are spoken in much of Central Europe, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Northern Asia.  The amount of speakers tops 400 million persons approximately, among which are Russians, Bielorussians, Ukranians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks.
They use the Cyrillic alphabet (under the influence of the Orthodox Church) and the Roman alphabet (under the influence of the Catholic Church).  In times of old, they also used the Arabic and Glagolitic alphabets.  In certain parts of Europe there were groups of people without their own alphabets, having to import one or another; this is the case of the Slavs, who were provided with an alphabet to evangelize them.
The principal diversification of the common Slavic language occurred, coincidentally, at the same time that Latin disintegrated into the Romance languages.
The Slavic languages are directly related to the Baltic language group, but also share certain linguistic innovations with other groups of Indo-European languages, such as the Indo-Iranian and Armenian groups.

Today we will talk about the Indo-Iranian languages and localization services through a reading of a recommended article.

At the beginning of the second millenium BC, the Indo-Iranian (relatives of the Aryans) emigrated towards Iran.  Around the year 1000BC they had already split into two branches: the Indian branch (also known as the Indo-Aryan branch) and the Iranian or Persian branch, with their language spoken in what today is Afghanistan and Iran.

The name that the Iranian tribes gave themselves (as did the Indo-Aryan tribes) was “aryan,” which lingers on in different forms in modern languages: in modern Persian Iran is the “country of the Aryans.”
It’s very important that such languages be kept in mind when selling products and services from other parts of the world.

In English, we use concision (many short words or phrases) as well as an economy of language (fewer words), the preference we demonstrate for the impersonal vision of reality (objectivity), our calls to evoke feelings (appeal to the senses, images), the abstract analysis and the lack of naming of the agent of an action (passive voice).

Concision and ellipsis (removing items) are also characteristic of English. We have a language that expresses reality in an objective and descriptive way. Spanish, on the other hand, perceives the world in a more abstract and analytical way.

The distinctive mark of English is the concise and dynamic expression (ease with which morphemes can be combined to form new words and terms) of reality. The versatility of the gerund is the best evidence for the dynamic economy of our language.

No Fear Shakespeare is a service that translates the most difficult of languages most people encounter, the Early Modern English of Shakespeare, into contemporary English prose. As we have touched on before, translators are readers more than anything and are primarily concerned with making a work understandable for their target audience and that is exactly what No Fear Shakespeare accomplishes.

I know I didn’t get this up before the end of the school year, but his tool should be ideal for high school and college students looking for an easier and more effective way of approaching Shakespeare’s works. Translators can appreciate the delicate touch that is required in order for a work separated by 500 years and half a language to be placed into a context wherein it is instantly recognizable as something that could have been written today.

There has historically been a strong affinity between English law and US law, with Common Law precedents being considered valid throughout many stratums of the US legal system.  After all, having been responsible for the creation of the Magna Carta (one of the most celebrated legal documents of all human history), it’s hard not to take seriously certain developments in the British legal field.

Which brings us to the topic of a recent development in the British courts, where a judge has come down with a landmark ruling denying anonymity to a blogger who has been trying to fight being named by The Times of London (which, using simple investigative journalism, came across his identity through a process of deduction).

The popular British blog by the name of NightJack, wherein an active police officer habitually posted very controversial pieces mocking department superiors and giving confidential information regarding ongoing investigations, will no longer have an anonymous writer…and that has a lot of bloggers with their panties all in a knot!

The ruling (which stated that the blogger had no “reasonable expectation” of anonymity) is surely going to generate a lot of commotion among the millions of internet users that blog with supposed anonymity; even leaving comments online is likely to cease being an anonymous affair, as in a separate court case in Las Vegas a newspaper has been subpoenaed by prosecutors for the names (and addresses, credit card numbers, and more personal info) of anonymous commenters that left aggressive or threatening remarks on the paper’s site.

So, the lessons of the day: don’t talk trash about your bosses, don’t make threatening comments online, and definitely do not pretend to have any “reasonable expectation” of privacy or anonymity on the Web!

On May 28, 2009, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, featuring special guest Tony Bennett,  held a black tie, red carpet event to help raise funds. The charity event was organized by Richard Estevez, CEO of Trusted Translations, Inc.

As part of its efforts to support St. Jude, Trusted Translations has created a special initiative to raise funds for the hospital called “Translation for St. Jude”.

To learn more about this initiative, please visit:

http://www.trustedtranslations.com/translation-for-st-jude.asp

As we saw in a recent post, Celtic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European languages.

The Celts were the first inhabitants of central-southern Europe, around the 5th century BC.

From a geographical and historical point of view, this subfamily can be divided into two branches: the continental branch, which has disappeared by now, and the insular branch, which can further be broken down as follows: Brythonic (including Breton), Cornish and Welsh on the one hand, and Gaelic on the other, which includes Irish, Erse and Mannish (the dialect of the Isle of Man).

Until the 5th century, the continental Celtic languages (including Gallic) were spoken throughout all of continental Europe, but gave way to the influence of the other widely spoken languages of the time, such as English and French.

Only the Gaelic and Brythonic varieties spoken in the British Isles and Brittany have withstood the passing of time, in addition to surviving in a few communities in the north and south of the United States that strive to preserve their original language.

The characteristic trait of the Celtic languages is the loss of the Indo-European phoneme /p/, which separates it from the other subfamilies.  Hence, a word containing “p” in Latin, Greek or Sanskrit will appear without it in the Celtic subfamily.

The rules of pronunciation in Celtic are enormously complex.  In general, writing and pronunciation don’t correspond as expected and the initial consonant of a word will vary depending on what the final phoneme of the previous word was.

All the Celtic languages use the Roman alphabet.

Currently, Breton is spoken in the French region of Brittany as a dialect, with loans from French and nasalization having been incorporated.
Welsh, also referred to as Cumbric (in reality a dialect), is the language of Wales and one of the most well known members of the Celtic subfamily.  In addition to being spoken in Wales, it is spoken in communities of the United States and Argentina, where, in the latter case, barely 150 Welsh immigrants settled in 1865.  Academics studying Welsh have established three periods: the ancient period (800-1100), the middle period (1100-1500), and the modern period (1500-present).  Welsh is divided into two varieties: Northern and Southern.

Irish, or also known as Irish Gaelic, is the oldest member of the Gaelic group.  Its history is broken down into four periods: old (800-1000), early (1000-1200), middle (1200-1500), and modern (1500-present).  It is a language with rich nominal and verbal inflection; only in the indicative do verbs have two tenses.

Around the 5th century the Irish invaded Scotland and brought with them a variety of Gaelic that replaced the traditional Brythonic language.  During the 15th century, due to the linguistic loans from English and Scandinavian, Scottish became a unique language and differentiated itself from Irish.
Scottish has four grammatical cases: nominative, genitive, dative and vocative.  The accent is placed on the first syllable, as in Irish.
There are two Scottish dialects: Northern and Southern, the latter being more similar to Irish.  The principal difference between the two dialects is the phoneme /é/, which becomes “eu” in the Northern dialect and becomes “ia” in the Southern one.

Mannish has a strong Scandinavian influence.  And that’s all!

This punctuation mark is, in Spanish, the equivalent to parentheses, though it does have one function that differs: marking off asides that are suggestive, ironic, or emotional, and the effect is stylistic. It must always be placed at the end of the aside, even when it is the end of the sentence.

In English, a single or double dash can also be used to mark off asides, but it also appears in cases of explanation, summary, or emphasis, whereas Spanish uses a colon, comma, semicolon, or ellipsis in those cases. It is used to indicate an interruption in the speech, in the same way that an ellipsis is used.

In English, when the aside that is marked off between dashes is within another aside that is marked off by commas, the second comma is omitted. Though in English there is a variation in the length of the dash and the use of spaces with it, its length and spacing (one before and after always) is universal in Spanish.

This blog is not a forum for furthering political agendas of any kind, and that is absolutely not the intention of this particular post.  What I am interested in pointing out, nonetheless, is the incredible power of words (at least their perceived power), and the topic I intend to draw upon happens to be highly politicized.

In reaction to the controversial and highly publicized speech President Obama gave in Cairo recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to give a speech of his own…and the other members of his governing coalition are very interested in just exactly what will be said.  Particularly the figures further to the political right in his coalition: they have asked the Prime Minister to entirely avoid enunciating the phrase “Palestinian state” in his speech (visit this article for a deeper scoop on this issue).

It would seem that merely muttering the phrase, whether in a positive or negative context, implies the inevitability of the idea itself.  With that reasoning, perhaps we all ought to be much more careful about what it is we do and don’t say!

Of course, politicians are famed for their shrewd (well, with some exceptions) choice of words, so the pressure on Netanyahu, from any direction, is only to be expected.  Considering the touchy nature of the issue and the circumstances, I imagine that the real pressure will be on the official translators and interpreters of his speech–absolutely no room for slip ups on that assignment!

As I mentioned earlier, the Global Language Monitor previewed the introduction of the one millionth word to the English language. Great publicity followed. They have returned two months later to declare that the one million word barrier has been surpassed. Fanfare abounds to celebrate this glorious day. And the GLM brand is once again associated with a concept that it made up on its own.

For the record, the millionth word is “Web 2.0″, which was coined ten years ago. It sure does work well for Internet publicity here, though.

Also among the last words to be recognized as “part of the English language” were Octomom and Jai Ho! Yeah, I can’t see how any person who takes languages seriosly would have a problem with any of this…

First, Octomom is a nickname given to one specific person. Logically, this means that J-Lo, Becks, and Governator also make up the compendium of the English language. As much as I love experimentation and the creativity behind “Octomom” and “Governator”, I refuse to believe that those are legitimate contributions to the world’s most ubiquitous language.

Jai Ho! is a foreign phrase that is not communicating a concept that is foreign to English. It’s just a phrase that has a rough translation in English but no demonstrated usage outside of a popular song (which is a fantastic song). I see no reason to include it in a list of English words, unlike “gesundheit” or “petits fours”, which have a unique usage within the language itself.

In short, I am TIRED of the GLM and its desperate quest for self promotion and I can’t believe that “serious news publications” buy into it.

I was sent over to Wordnik.com yesterday and all productive plans I had were immediately dashed and replaced with “let’s see what it says about this word…”

Wordnik’s purpose is to display all working knowledge, centered around the definition, etymology, and usage examples, but also providing information such as statistics and associated images, of just about any word in English your heart can dream of (1.7 million in total, according to the site). Users (registration required) can make contributions to any word they see on the site, such as related words and regional usage.

It does use licensed dictionaries and referenced works as the basis for its definitions and some usage examples. However, the success of the endeavor and where its usefulness as a tool for everyone and not just language researchers is that it incorporates recent Twitter messages as “usage examples” and can become another search tool to reflect and expand the common vocabulary we English speakers throughout the world are employing, which changes minute by minute each day.

I would like to thank everyone for coming tonight to support this great cause. Many people have come from very distant places to be here, including Brazil. In fact, I convinced many of my friends and loved ones to fly in by telling them that this is probably the closest thing I would get to getting married, so they had to come.

Every so often, something touches our hearts that changes our lives forever. About a year ago, I met a 10 year old boy at a St. Jude event, Daniel, and he told me about his battle with cancer. He was about the same age as my two beautiful nephews.

He told me his story about how one day he was feeling a bit unusual after playing outside. They decided to take him to the local hospital just in case and the hospital had initially determined there was probably nothing wrong. As he was telling this story, he was as upbeat as can be as if he was talking about eating ice cream.

He continued his story. He told me that a couple days later they called him back to his local hospital. They informed him he had a very rare form of cancer. They told him he had the choice to have some very risky surgery or go home and live the rest of his THREE months of life.

Needless to say, my heart dropped to the floor and I started to tear up. He continued by saying, in a very matter of fact manner, that they went home with what seemed like a hopeless scenario. A couple days later, Daniel’s mom saw Marlo Thomas on TV talking about St. Jude and she decided to call the number given on the TV screen.

After explaining the situation to St. Jude, they immediately flew him to the Hospital in Memphis and started treatment. TWO YEARS later, he is alive and well and most importantly, still that happy kid. Daniel touched my heart in so many ways and started me on this journey that has lead to this day.

Just a couple months after meeting Daniel:

- I meet Josh Neuman (a Committee member) and he tells me his story how he lost his little brother to cancer,
- My sister’s best friend’s daughter is diagnosed with cancer and is being helped by the research and training of St. Jude,
- I approach one of tonight’s sponsors for support and it turns out that his daughter has been saved due in part to St. Jude’s research
- There are so many stories like these, and you will get the opportunity to hear more of them tonight from the individuals most directly impacted.

But the fact of the matter is, St. Jude touches all of our lives in one way or another. They truly represent hope in the most dire of human situations. My hope is that this event will raise millions over time to help St. Jude and their important work. Again, I would like to thank of all of you for being here, Molly my co-chair, all the committee members, our sponsors, Kristin Davis, Cuba Gooding, Sr., and, of course, Tony Bennett and for helping us launch this first step in a journey of hope.

Richard Estevez
Chair St. Jude Chocolat au Vin

In a previous post of mine I mentioned the intriguing and perplexing condition of synesthesia, noting that it only affects a very tiny portion of the total population.  Nonetheless, much to my surprise it has been brought to my attention that we are all synesthetes to one degree or another.  In fact, it makes quite a bit of sense (of course, only after reading a well-enunciated opinion from an authoritative source): our brains have a tendency to fuse neurological stimuli of different sorts in order to help us process multiple sources of information simultaneously…

There is a very interesting article posted here that makes this curious assertion, based on a series of clever research efforts that helped bring out the synesthete in the common man (or woman).  You can submit yourself to the research tests at the site and see for yourself just how much your brain bundles different sensory stimuli.

In a brilliant move, one of the head researchers recruited a world-class chef to put some of the basic ideas garnered through the research activities to the test.  Imitating the classic experiments of psychologist Wolfgang Kohler – with a touch of creative license – it appears that most people associate certain flavors with certain words/sounds.  The results: brie chesse is decidedly “maluma” and cranberries, “takete.”  You’ll have to visit the link above to figure that one out…

It seems that the days of stigmatizing synesthetes are coming to an end; if anything, it would appear that they got a bit too much of a good thing, and don’t suffer a “defect” as has historically been thought of them.  Although, it should be noted, in extreme cases of synesthesia the subject may complain that the constant sensory overload becomes quite overwhelming.

Octavio Paz asserts that language is, above all, translation (translation and literature are synonyms). Translation is always a literary operation, since it is an artistic or scientific work as it includes a “transformation” of the original that is literary in the sense that it uses literary resources (in essence, metonymy and metaphor). Translations are a literary act that we use all of our literary knowledge in.

He rejects the idea that poetry, which he considers as universal, is untranslatable (everything can be translated, even poetry). “The connotative meanings can be preserved if the poet/translator can reproduce the position of the words, poetic context, where they fit” (the translator can use all of his or her knowledge in a poem).

The translator’s activity (reading, critiquing, revising) is comparable to the reader’s (exegetic, up to the last detail) and the critic’s (both the original and the translation are critiqued), with the exceptions that the reader translates the language itself and the critic creates an open version, a transposition. In any case, there is not a science of translation, though the discipline can be studied scientifically. Citing Valéry, he asserts that translation of poetry consists in producing with different means according to analogous effects.

According to Paz, translation and creation are win operations. As a result, it is impossible to separate them in the history of culture. Literature cannot be segregated by country and, if all styles have been translinguistic (equal styles in all languages), translation is found in the heart of all cultural development (it shows how essential translation is in every culture).